It is not necessary to face your fears in order to overcome them. You can just erase the fears from your mind.
In a study published Monday in Nature Human Behavior, scientists claim that they can simply "remove specific fears from the brain". With the use of brain scanning technology and artificial intelligence, scientists can manoeuvre the fears in the brain so that they can simply get wiped out.
"We always thought this was ambitious, but it worked the way we hoped it would," said Ben Seymour, a clinical neuroscientist and member of the team at Cambridge University. "We don't completely erase the fear memory, but it is substantially reduced."
For their experiment, scientists built up a "fear memory" in volunteers. Each subject went through some shocks whenever they saw some colors. When the new fear overcame them, it would create patterns in the brain and would recur subconsciously without any effort on the part of the volunteers. At every instance of fear, the experts gave the volunteers rewards. Finally, the fear memory could be overwritten.
"We don't want them to think about fear when they are in the scanner," said Seymour. "They are not aware what we are detecting in the brain activity."
At present, a lot of treatments for phobias and PTSD require drugs with unpleasant side-effects, or aversion therapy. That would call for patients to get exposed to their fears, said a press release. The new technique they hope to employ is called decoded neurofeedback, or DecNef.
Through their technique, scientists hope to bring down phobias and PTSD if the brain patterns linked with fears, such as spiders, are located.
In a few years, the expert Mitsuo Kawato is hoping that he can begin "systematic DecNef therapy".
